“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”- Aldous Huxley (English Novelist and Critic, 1894-1963)

The rate at which the future becomes the present, which, in turn becomes the past, has never been greater in terms of the technological changes that are taking place in today's world and the stock photography industry has not been immune, though a great deal of the work has been pushed downstream.

Photographers are now required to do more and more of the work that used to be performed by stock agencies, designers and printers, yet prices and percentages paid to photographers have not gone up appreciably and in far too many instances have actually gone down.

The big stock distributors claim that they deserve a larger percentage of each sale or license due to the increased costs of digital technology while denying the fact that photographers have also seen drastically increased costs due to this very same technology. They also fail to mention that we are doing much of the work that was originally provided by stock agencies.

Digital cameras and digital backs are more expensive than their film counterparts and quality lenses have never been cheap. The last new film camera I purchased was a Canon F-1 with motor drive which was bought in 1992. The cost then was approximately $1700 which would be the equivalent of $2435.50 in 2006 dollars. Still considerably cheaper than the current crop of professional level DSLRs and a computer was not required to prepare the output for delivery.

Working digitally also requires computers with more speed, processing power, memory and storage capacity than their average office counterparts. Then there is the cost of imaging and cataloging software which is no small investment. Add to all of this the need to constantly upgrade cameras, computers and software in order to meet the ever increasing quality and resolution demands made by the distributors and the investment required is substantially greater than in the days of shooting film.

This does not even take into account the vastly increased amount of time that photographers have to spend in post production once the images have been created not to mention constantly having to learn the idiosyncrasies of new hardware and software as well as the time devoted to creating back-ups.

Then of course there is the time required readying files for each distributor and here there are no set standards. with each distributor often having vastly different submission requirements. Some want large jpeg images, others want tiffs. Some require tiffs with LZW compression, others with no compression. For photographers who submit to multiple distributors, this becomes a very labor intensive, time consuming proposition.

Here we have not even touched on “keywording”. Some distributors want keywords to include both singular and plural, as in “car” and “cars” and not just differently spelled plurals like “woman” and “women”. Some distributors want keywords included that describe any potential concepts while others want these conceptual types of keywords kept to a minimum.

Software at some online distributors read the titles, captions and keywords contained as metadata in each uploaded image and automatically include those in the database. Others require that this information be added after the image files have been uploaded.

The search engines used at different agencies also vary widely in their usefulness and efficiency. While photographers may feel that this is mainly a problem for those searching for images, it is also a problem for photographers in that it becomes an issue with providing the titles, captions and/or keywords that work best with the idiosyncrasies of each search engine. Some search engines lend more weight to words contained in titles or captions than to keywords. Other completely ignore titles or captions and depend entirely on keywords.

This is yet one more area where we must spend even more of our time studying each of these to see what works best and where and also to optimize this information in the files that we provide for each separate distributor.

Photographers who license images directly to clients rather than through an agency or distributor are often asked to provide the images “press ready” in CMYK. What these clients have no understanding of is the fact that there is no real “standard” CMYK profile. These profiles vary from printer to printer and are completely dependent on the type of presses being used. Unless the photographer can contact the printer and actually obtain the correct CMYK profile so that the image can be properly soft-proofed, then the best we can do is provide the image with a generic CMYK profile and hope for the best. If the printed images end up looking like crap, then of course it is we who are to blame rather than the printer.

Other clients often want images delivered as “image objects”, that is images shot against a white background with clipping paths already in place. This of course was historically done by designers but is now often required of photographers with of course, no increase in compensation.

All of this begs the question, “Where do we go from here?” I would venture to guess that whatever the future holds for photographers, it will most likely be much more expensive by way of increasing investments in cameras, computer hardware and software as well as our time.

“The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.”- John Sladek (American science fiction author, 1937-2000)

© 2006 Jim Hunter, All Rights Reserved Bio  Contact